Ten Thousand Years Older: A Fascinating Short Documentary by Werner Herzog

I've long been interested in remote cultures and uncontacted peoples, a fascination I share, apparently, with film director Werner Herzog. Back in 2000, when everyone had millennium fever, he was asked to make a ten-minute short film for a program of shorts called Ten Minutes Older, each of which was to be a meditation on time. Herzog chose as his subject the Amondauas people of Brazil, who until 1981 had never had contact with modern civilization. The film opens with footage from that first tense encounter, then shows what happened just a few weeks later -- many of the people, who lacked the immunities to common viruses which most of us take for granted, succumbed to disease. Twenty years later, Herzog visits the (now immunized) survivors -- the elders, in tee-shirts and ball caps, who reminisce nostalgically about their old ways, and the younger generation, who are embarrassed to have "savages" for parents. It's a strange and dark and somehow fatalistic little film; in other words, classic Herzog.

Netflix might know your TV habits better than you do. Recently, the entertainment company's normally tight-lipped number-crunchers looked at user data collected between November 1, 2016 and November 1, 2017 to see which series people were powering through and which ones they were digesting more slowly. By analyzing members’ average daily viewing habits, they were able to determine which programs were more likely to be “binged” (or watched for more than two hours per day) and which were more often “savored” (or watched for less than two hours per day) by viewers.

They found that the highest number of Netflix bingers glutted themselves on the true crime parody American Vandal, followed by the Brazilian sci-fi series 3%, and the drama-mystery 13 Reasons Why. Other shows that had viewers glued to the couch in 2017 included Anne with an E, the Canadian series based on L. M. Montgomery's 1908 novelAnne of Green Gables, and the live-action Archie comics-inspired Riverdale.

In contrast, TV shows that viewers enjoyed more slowly included the Emmy-winning drama The Crown, followed by Big Mouth, Neo Yokio, A Series of Unfortunate Events, GLOW, Friends from College, and Ozark.

There's a dark side to this data, though: While the company isn't around to judge your sweatpants and the chip crumbs stuck to your couch, Netflix is privy to even your most embarrassing viewing habits. The company recently used this info to publicly call out a small group of users who turned their binges into full-fledged benders:

To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?

Oh, and if you're the one person in Antarctica binging Shameless, the streaming giant just outed you, too.

Netflix broke down their full findings in the infographic below and, Big Brother vibes aside, the data is pretty fascinating. It even includes survey data on which shows prompted viewers to “Netflix cheat” on their significant others and which shows were enjoyed by the entire family.